Gospel (14 page)

“Milk?”

“Yes, please.”

Dr. Renaldo bent over before a small boxlike refrigerator and removed from it a half-pint carton, holding it up to his nose. He winced. “Sorry, that seems to have gone off.”

“Doesn't matter,” said Lucy.

The don made do with some “coffee whitener” and stirred that in with some brown sugar clotted around the sugarspoon, which had doubled too many times as the stirring spoon. “I don't suppose,” said Dr. Renaldo, proud of his creation, “that you would have preferred sherry.”

“No thank you,” said Lucy, ready after last night to take the pledge.

“I do believe it's all that will keep me from the abyss on this horrid afternoon,” her host said, producing a bottle and wiping the dust off the tattered, ancient label. “The warmth of Andalusia,” he said vagariously.

The phone rang again.

“Shall I?” asked Lucy.

“I'd ever so much appreciate it.”

Lucy picked up the phone and answered a similar round of questions politely. “… No sir, I was expecting him for our class today—”

“Tutorial,”
whispered Dr. Renaldo helpfully.

“—for our tutorial. I'm sitting here with my essay, in fact,” she added, observing a silent clap of approval from Dr. Renaldo. A pause as she listened. “Yes, I'm aware the term is over for undergraduates,” she admitted, remembering Ursula, “but I've been bad this term and so Dr. Renaldo has demanded these papers from me…”

Dr. Renaldo joined his hands at his pursed lips, thrilled with her invention.

Lucy shielded the phone and whispered: “It's Dr. Blackwelder, who says to tell you that he knows you're sitting right here and they're not starting the meeting without you so you might as well come.”

“They're bluffing.”

Lucy reiterated Dr. Renaldo's absence, and suggested he might be sick.

After hanging up, Lucy asked, “Is attending this meeting so horrible?”

He held up his sizable glass of sherry to the gray light. “Most assuredly. It's all quite reasonable in America, isn't it? You hire businesspeople to do the business of the college. Security people to see to security. Academics in one building, the help in the other. We poor educators here at Oxford must double as disciplinary deans, quartermasters, supply officers, secretaries, and investment bankers. I'm in charge of Senior Common Room Dessert, amid my other travails here at Braithwaite—a college, dear girl, in utter decline.”

“Yes, sir,” she nodded.

“If the peaches aren't ripe I get stern letters from my colleagues. I am still in disgrace after the incident of the rancid grapes from Monday night. I say, am I to worry myself about the ripeness of fruit or serious scholarship?”

Lucy put aside her tasteless cup of tea. “I wasn't aware Oxford faculty had to double up so much.”

“It's the meanness of Braithwaite, I promise you. I'm surprised they don't have us change the sheets and scour the loos. I suppose that indignity awaits, so I shouldn't suggest it too loudly.”

The phone rang again.

Lucy suggested they let it ring and Dr. Renaldo agreed. But it kept ringing. Finally in annoyance he directed Lucy to pick it up.

“No,” she began, “Dr. Renaldo is out, I believe—”

Dr. Renaldo snatched the phone: “Bloody hell, Blackwelder. In flagrante delicto, for Christ's sake. I thought it was perfectly understood that Fellows didn't interrupt the other Fellows in the throes of passion…” His face then brightened. “Oh hello, darling, it's you.”

His wife.

“Darling, do be a love and call Blackwelder for me and tell him I'm much too sick to come in, would you? Yes, I shall have to sneak around for the rest of the day, I suppose. Perhaps you can send the boys over and they can secrete me out in a sack.” His wife apparently agreed, and Dr. Renaldo hung up, looking content.

“About this poem
Andreas,
” Lucy tentatively suggested.

“Yes, well. The source is a fairly old tradition that pops up a number of places in the Greek and Celtic world, really. The adventures of Andrew the Disciple and his pal Matthew, the Evangelist.”

“Yes?”

“Well, they go about, performing miracles, going to sea, having adventures, finally dodging the cannibals in Ethiopia.”

Ethiopia, thought Lucy, stirring. Where they speak Amharic, like one of the books called up by Dr. O'Hanrahan. “Is it based on an apocryphal gospel?” she asked.

“I suppose there is an
Acts of Andrew,
something like that. The legends of the disciples through the Early Church and Dark Ages were innumerable, really. The earliest copy of the
Andreas
is in Antwerp, it is thought. It was, for its time, an international best-seller.”

Antwerp. Where some of O'Hanrahan's credit card receipts came from.

“Does the
Andreas
have any connection with Trier, West Germany?”

“Not that I know of.”

There was a knock on the door. A muffled voice outside declared: “I know you're in there, Renaldo, so you might as well surrender!”

Blackwelder, mouthed Dr. Renaldo, wearily getting up out of his squeaky chair.

“I can hear your damned chair squeaking!” said Dr. Blackwelder.

Dr. Renaldo led Lucy around to sit in his chair while he shut himself up in a coat closet with his smoldering pipe. Dr. Blackwelder announced he was coming in, and the next moment he did.

“Hello, sir,” said Lucy sweetly. “Can I help you?”

“Where is he? Where've you put him?”

“Dr. Renaldo, sir? I am waiting for him myself. Sitting at his desk and … reading.”

Dr. Blackwelder was a short, stocky man in a beige woollen suit, bow tie, his face composed of pinks and whites, a man who could play Dr. Watson to Renaldo's Holmes in an amateur-theater production. Dr. Blackwelder loped about the office suspecting all cabinets, doors, areas under chairs and sofas. Then he walked behind Lucy and looked over her shoulder.

He read: “The ‘Liges/Lifes' Controversy in the Old English
Phoenix
and
Guthlac B,
by Sholto B. Renaldo, Fellow of Braithwaite College, Oxford University.” He stared at Lucy conspiratorially. “You can't honestly say, young lady, that you are reading something so preposterous and ill-researched as this collection of pretentious ramblings, are you?”

Blackwelder's fat face suppressed a laugh. He was trying to get Renaldo to reveal himself.

“I pity you literature students,” Dr. Blackwelder went on, stalking around the room near the closet door that held Dr. Renaldo. “… forced to learn this useless drivel so a few minor intellects can hold their long-outdated posts, smoking pipes that smell of dried horse droppings … sipping the finest sherry in common rooms, wasting their college's precious delights.”

“Yes, sir,” said Lucy, trying to look away from where Renaldo was hiding.

“Of course,” said Blackwelder, “recently, we here at Braithwaite would be hard-pressed to uncover but the meagerest of delights. One need never fear wasting the metallic treacle, as if distilled within a rusty culvert, that passes for sherry in the Senior Common Room
Dessert.
” He aimed his diatribe at the area behind a worn sofa. “Not to mention the despoilt, maggot-ridden fruit strewn shamelessly before us each evening. Rotting. Rancid. As if gathered from some roadside tip…” Blackwelder aimed his rich recital at the closet door: “The emetic array of cloying sweets and stale biscuits, the unfailingly putrid cheeses, to be washed down with cheap cut-rate alcoholic swill no man of sensibility would use to unclog his drain!”

Blackwelder had tears in his eyes from suppressed mirth. He observed Lucy, hoping for a clue. “No,” he concluded, “perhaps such a useless study as Anglo-Saxon depletes nothing from the already destitute commonweal, hm? Well, I shall report my dear colleague's absence to the Common Room and his friend Mrs. Miggins, as we vote on matters concerning him. Good day, young lady.”

Having had his fun, Blackwelder left, and slowly Dr. Renaldo peeked outside of the closet in a plume of escaping pipe smoke. “Victory is mine, nonetheless,” he said placidly. “Any hour away from Mrs. Miggins is a proof that there is yet a merciful God.”

“I've met her, unfortunately.”

“See what we've fallen to?” he asked, reclaiming his chair. “So eager to have anyone do our miserable accounting work that we turn over the college to these harridans and cower before them. She strides the narrow college like a
colossa
and we petty Fellows walk under her huge legs and peep about to find ourselves dishonorable … fruit,” he concluded, mangling the Bard.

“Yes, well, thank you for your time, sir.”

“Sure you…” He brushed the lapels of his green velour smoking jacket and cocked his eyebrows seductively. “… sure you won't stay for a bit of whiskey? Comfort from this miserable, loveless day?”

She'd heard about the dons at Oxford. Was this a lechery in the making?

He added, “I could turn up the heat for us…”

Greater love hath no Oxford don, thought Lucy. “No thank you, I really must be getting back to the library. But thank you.”

“Oh, do call again,” he said in his meek alto. “I'll be here.”

Lucy broadcast a few smiles and slipped away. Out of Braithwaite, back to All Souls across the tundra and the howling winds, and up to O'Hanrahan's chambers. She knocked.

“Go away,” he murmured groggily.

“Sorry to mess up your nap again, sir, but I—”

The door was yanked open, and he said intensely quietly, “I'm
not
taking a nap.”

Before there could be more wrath, she quickly held out the bank envelope with $400. He examined it carefully.

“Not bad, huh?” she said. “$700 in an afternoon. You oughta make me your assistant.”

“Thank you,” he said begrudgingly. “When the great book is published about all this, I promise you'll get a footnote. And so, good night.”

“Wait, my guesses!”

“Quickly, quickly…”

“Uh, Andrew?”

Nope.

“An earlier redaction of
Matthew,
I think. It—”

Nope.

She took a wild stab. “Guess No. 5, Bartholomew/Nathanael?”

Nope.

“Awww, I thought I had it.”

The professor eyed her appreciatively. “You must have been going through the books I ordered up at the Codrington. Scheming with the librarians, I see, the Stymphalian Birds…”

“And you're sure it's not St. Bart?”

“His relics once were here in Oxford, you know,” said O'Hanrahan.

(Poor St. Bartholomew, flayed in India, patron saint of all tanners and laborers who worked with skins. As a great favor to King Canute, a Danish thug canonized by the groveling church, an arm of St. Bartholomew was shipped to England and was the sensation of the 1000s, We can assure you.)

“Edward III built St. Bartlemas in Oxford, as I recall,” said the professor, “which housed the flayed, blackened, peeled-off skin of St. Bart. What became of this relic, no one knows.”

“I suspect the English mistook it for one of their breakfast foods and ate it. Now, sir, when can we talk about you-know-who and what I'm supposed to tell Chicago and Dr. Shaughnesy?”

O'Hanrahan looked down on her with unaccustomed patience. “Okay,” he began, “what about tomorrow for breakfast? Twelve noon at the Randolph, this time it will be my treat.”

“You mean it?”

“And I will tell you everything; all things will be made known. I shall imbue you with
gnosis,
” he added, making the sign of the Cross over her as a priest might, “and many gifts of the Spirit.”

“Well, thank you, sir, I—”

The door slammed.

She cupped her hands to say through it: “Good evening, sir.”

No response returned, but no matter. She would succeed on her mission at last! And who knows, she thought, with Dr. Shaughnesy sitting on my examination panel for my thesis, could my getting an extension be too difficult now? My stock will be at an all-time high among the faculty and how they'll enjoy the tales I'll tell about their colleague and nemesis, Dr. Patrick Virgil O'Hanrahan.

Lucy walked from All Souls up the High Street where she noticed a kebab van already doing business in the damp, gloomy early evening. She peered about in search of Duncan—primarily, to apologize for throwing up in front of him and being so drunk, and secondly to test the waters for friendship. Maybe romance even. Hey, Judy, I may send that postcard yet! Going back to the guest room in Braithwaite, Lucy changed out of her cold, wet clothes and lay on her bed thumbing through her Oxford guidebook. She became curious about the Franciscans. Checking the index, indeed, she found that the Franciscans did have a monastic hall here in Oxford, Greyfriars. She looked it up on the map.

Do you suppose …

Lucy shuffled back into her coat, grabbed her map, and went out into the night. The orange phosphorescent streetlights illumined the old colleges and threw titanic shadows of passersby upon medieval walls. A mist of fog and headlights sat low upon the road, and the end of Broad Street looked eerily suitable for Jack the Ripper to return. Indeed all the Oxford streets were quiet, a few hours into pub time, and all the more desolate for that.

Lucy found the right street and then the house number of Franciscan Greyfriars Hall, deep in Anglican Oxford. She backtracked to double-check, then stood intimidated before the large oak door.

She knocked.

Nothing. Maybe they're having a Friday service. Presently a young man in Franciscan garb peeked out from behind the barely parted door.

Lucy: “Gabriel O'Donoghue, please. It's quite important.”

He looked at her innocently. “The American chap?”

“That's the one. He's expecting me.”